(Web Desk) - Three years after the start of COVID-19, health care workers feel 'overworked, understaffed and underappreciated'
Megan Graham thought her job stress would get better as COVID-19 subsided.
But the 38-year-old Nashville-based technologist says that three years after the start of the pandemic, many health care workers still feel like they’re hanging on by a thread.
“COVID made people run from healthcare, leaving the ones who stayed overworked and understaffed,” Graham, who works in medical imaging and has been caring for COVID patients throughout the pandemic, tells The Messenger.
“A lot of us are working mandatory overtime and having to cover multiple shifts due to a lack of staffing.”
And Graham is hardly alone when it comes to feeling burned out and underappreciated.
According to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released Tuesday, health care workers are facing an unprecedented mental health crisis.
Harassment, in particular, contributed significantly to mental health issues. Of the workers who said they had been harassed — either threatened, verbally abused or bullied — 85% said they experienced anxiety, 60% experienced depression and 81% experienced burnout.
The pressure of dealing with COVID day after day caused a mass exodus of health care workers, but for those who stayed, that pressure never went away.
And some say that it’s gotten even worse.
“There is a lack of support among leadership and management.
Hard work is not recognized and employers have unrealistic expectations they want met in order to meet a certain patient satisfaction score,” a nurse, who did not want to be named out of fear of retaliation by their employer, tells The Messenger.
Others The Messenger spoke with said that they are frustrated by working with “skeleton crew” staffing ratios and are overwhelmed by patient caseloads.
“It’s honestly not worth [working in health care] most days,” one said.
A study released by the National Council of State Boards of Nursing in April 2023 revealed that around 100,000 registered nurses left the field in the two years following the onset of COVID.
But it doesn’t end there — that same study also found that more than 600,000 registered nurses have plans to leave the field by 2027.
And it isn’t just nurses, medical assistants and imaging technologists who are feeling the added burden that comes with being understaffed — it’s doctors, too.
The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) suggests that the overall shortage of doctors across multiple specialties — radiology, internal medicine and more — is expected to climb into the hundreds of thousands in the coming years.
AAMC estimates that there could be a shortage of between 37,800 and 124,000 physicians by 2034.
‘They are living in fight-or-flight’ Stress and burnout are not new to the health care industry.
Any role that puts a person responsible for another person’s well-being, whether in an administrative or clinical capacity, increases the likelihood of mental health problems, like anxiety, depression and burnout.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that as many as 79% of physicians reported feeling burned out even before the pandemic began.
COVID undoubtedly exacerbated these struggles in health care staff “because [COVID] prompted such an inundation of need,” Julie Mangus, licensed professional counselor in Nashville, Tennessee, tells The Messenger.